Sweetheart
by Raphanizein
Summary: There's an awful lot to learn when you become a human for the first time. Aperture didn't code for everything, and Chell is happy to teach him the rest. Chelley. Rated a little bit high for kissing and a bit of swearing.


**AN: And here's a bit of Chelley. This was written for a friend, who wanted Chell to teach a newly humanised Wheatley about taste and smell, only for him to get a little, um, distracted by her. Rating is probably too high, but you can never be too careful with licky-licky and kissy-kissy. So yeah, warnings for licky-licky and kissy-kissy. And some swearing.**

**Thanks to 0-moonwind for pointing out that silly things had happened with the spacing when it got uploaded. I had noticed, but I wasn't sure whether that was how the spacing looked following italics or not. Silly Doc Manager. It's edited now, instead of following my initial instinct to just delete the darn story for the blot on my reputation it now is.**

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The day had started, like all the best days, with a child's science textbook. Wheatley's knowledge of the human body had been woefully lacking. In fact, his knowledge of anything outside Aperture had been woefully lacking. Even his knowledge of things inside Aperture had been… But that was enough of that. They were free; they would never need to think about that facility again. Now that he possessed a human body, he had a lot of catching up to do, mainly the sorts of things that those born human normally took for granted. Wheatley's perception of humans as a core had been of beings that were manipulative, malodorous and slightly squishy. It was time to change that, Chell decided. And since there was an awful lot for the giddy human to learn she would have to start from scratch, hence the child-friendly textbook.

It had been almost two weeks since she had rented the book and began her tutoring of Wheatley. He was certainly an eager student, if not a terribly bright one. When he had been transferred into a human body, the first thing he had done was yelped. The second was to clasp his hands over his mouth. The third had been to stare down at his fingers, and finally he had curled into a ball and started to cry. After twenty minutes of patting shoulders and soothing whispers, it transpired that the sensory overload had been too much for him. The flood of sensations - touch, smell, taste, all things that had never been coded for in his programming - had filled him with such terror and joy that he had broken down. That had been when she'd decided that he would need teaching about the world and himself. Small, coaxing steps, like a parent teaching their child to walk. Thankfully motor control wasn't something that Wheatley had too much trouble with, seeing how the core had been coded with it. He only flailed deliberately, and those occasions were becoming rarer as his confidence grew. It had taken four days to get him from the point where every brush of something against his skin sent him into a panic of tangled limbs to the point where he could hold something without immediately squeezing or throwing it. An entire bottle of ketchup had been wasted that way, and they were just lucky that the neighbour's cat landed the right way up. Wheatley could occupy himself for literal hours now with his sense of touch, walking around the apartment in a tactile reverie as his hands took in every texture. Still, his favourite had turned out to be human and Chell-shaped. The sofa that he was meant to sleep on had never been used, and not just because it was too short for the gangly human - the thought of being on his own, even for a few hours, was enough to make him shake. Seeing Wheatley hunched into one side of the sofa, eyes darting anxiously and lower lip trembling, looking for all the world like a giant abandoned puppy, had melted her heart somewhat. Even if her own bed wasn't big enough, she was willing to compromise. Wheatley slept curled up around her, snuggled against her warm body and enjoying the contrast between the warmth and softness of her skin and the slightly rougher, cooler fabric of the oversized T-shirt and shorts she wore as pyjamas. Yes, her body fascinated him even more than his own. Even her hair was a source of interest to him. Although he'd had to give up his habit of blowing locks of her hair about while she was trying to sleep. On more than one night she'd had to put the bedside lamp on and glare at him.

So getting him used to touch had been successful. It was teaching him about taste and smell that was taking a little longer. At least the core had had an instinct that spiky things were bad. He hadn't needed too many plasters over the last few days. No, taste and smell were completely alien to him. Every meal had been greeted with the kind of wonderment reserved for children and their first fireworks. Every morsel had to be prodded at, scooped up, sniffed, popped into his mouth, rolled around over his tongue, chewed deliberately and swallowed with closed eyes and a blissful expression, only for the cycle to begin anew. Chell thought that if he was ever to walk past a bakery, Wheatley would spontaneously combust. Even if he didn't understand taste and smell entirely yet, he derived a lot of pleasure from them. He didn't understand why Chell had blindfolded him either, but he wasn't getting any sort of pleasure from that. She'd shown him a page, something about potatoes and apples…? Then the cloth had been swung over his eyes and knotted behind his head, and some kind of clip had been pushed over his nose. Something scraped and chopped a foot or so in front of him. Chell dumped the white cubes on a plate before prodding at the corner of Wheatley's mouth, silently telling him to open it. What was she doing? Was that book some kind of torture manual? Why would they even give children torture manuals? Humans were a strange bunch. If there was one thing that Aperture had taught him, it was that torture could be dressed up as science pretty easily. It could even get funding. Even if he'd been a product of that science, the faultless trust he had placed in it as a core was diminishing. But not his trust for Chell. Surely whatever experiment she was trying to pursue wouldn't hurt him… He hesitantly complied, only for her to place something cold and square onto his tongue. Wheatley crunched it between his teeth, then gulped. The thing had been pretty flavourless.

"Apple. Can you say it?" Even without his sight, he could recognise the smirk behind her voice. She had that look on her face, he just knew it, that irritatingly adorable look, with one side of her mouth quirked up and her eyes crinkled at the corners, and any moment now she'd let out that little chuckle…

"Of course I can say apple, love! Stop trying to get all clever with me, with your 'quotes'-" He raised his hands to make speech-mark twitches with his fingers, "and your 'apples'-" Another flex of the fingers, "and your… I had to check if you were brain-damaged, OK? Very common for humans to, you know, go off a little when they're in statis… And they told us, right, it's right there in the Aperture Science Test Subject Post-Statis Assessment And Care Manual, that they have to say 'apple', and if they _don't _say 'apple', then they're brain damaged. Alright?"

Chell placed a fingertip to his lips to shush him. The familiar huffing sound of stifled laughter broke the silence of the room.

"What? What's so funny?"

She shook her head, biting into her lip. How was she supposed to explain how ridiculous his voice sounded with his nose pinched by that clip? Instead she reached out for a chunk of raw potato and pressed it into his mouth. "And that's a potato."

"Very funny, love…" he muttered around the potato cube, chewing it. As soon as he'd swallowed, another scrap of food was rested against his lips. He bit into it and chewed until he felt Chell's expectant stare on him a few moments later. "What?"

"So what is it?"

"What, this? Well it's, er…" He rolled it over his tongue. "It's definitely a…" The cube had been tasteless and crisp, just like the previous two. "Oh, very clever, lady! But not clever _enough_! I know _exactly _what this is!" What the hell was it? "This is a… a papple-atato. Oh, what?" His tone was indignant as he interrupted her laughter. "Doesn't your textbook _have _papple-atatoes in it? Not a very good textbook then, is it?"

Her trembling fingers scrabbled at the back of his head, loosening the blindfold before finally pulling it off. Now he could see that Chell's shoulders were shaking and her face was flushed from laughing so much. Wheatley glared, prying the clip from his nose and rubbing the little sore spot. Picking his glasses off the table and pushing them back along his nose, he reached for the textbook and scanned the open page. In a large, child-friendly cloud shape was written in large, child-friendly letters, 'Try This At Home!'. He read the paragraph, muttering to himself as he did.

"…pieces of apple and raw potato… get your friend to hold his nose - HEY! You never said I could hold my nose, love! That clip hurt! - feed him… can't taste the difference… Ohhhhh…" He closed the book, contentment crossing his features. "So _that's _what you were doing. Smell affects the ability to taste." He looked proud of himself, almost as if he had conjured that line up himself instead of lifting it straight from the textbook. "Hey, what are you - no!" Chell had picked up the blindfold again. "Nooo, and especially no! You put that down this instant, lady!" One arm had been flung out to point at the offending nose clip. "The experiment's over, remember? You gave me the potato and papple… apple… stop that… and stop that too, I don't need the blindfold for anything!" She gestured towards the plate. Chell hadn't only prepared potato and apple, but she'd also cut up half a pineapple. If there was one fruit that Wheatley loved, it was pineapple. Sight or pineapple? It wasn't a difficult choice. Before he even knew what he was doing, he'd taken off his glasses and tied the cloth back over his eyes. …OK, that had been kind of stupid. But still, there would be pineapple. She slipped the clip onto his nose. He pulled it off and threw it across the room, where it plinked against the wall and hit the floor with another plink. Pinching his own nose defiantly while glaring… did no good, did it? Not with that towel over his eyes. But his thoughts of defiance and failure thereof evaporated as soon as he felt insistent fleshy fingertips between his lips, trying to pry them open. He opened his mouth, letting Chell place a piece of pineapple between his teeth. Wheatley's tongue flicked against it, drawing it back into his mouth to chew, to try and spread the flavour across his tongue. …It was fairly disappointing. His nose was still pinched. The pineapple had none of its usual sharp acidity. Wheatley grumbled as he swallowed.

She chuckled and pulled his hand away from his nose, although she left the blindfold in place. Picking something else from the place she moved it to his open and expectant mouth, laying the tip of it onto his tongue.

"…What the bloody hell," he muttered around the stick. She ignored his complaint, sliding the stick along the near edge of his tongue while consulting the tongue map in the textbook. It was a fairly old book; even if the theory of taste areas had been disproved, it was still worth testing while she had a willing subject. The wooden surface no longer tasted sweet, as it had on the tip of his tongue, but almost salty. As she moved the stick further back Wheatley coughed, and she withdrew it hurriedly, replacing it with a pineapple chunk to placate him. His discomforted expression vanished almost immediately. He really did like the fruit that much; something about its texture and its sharp taste made him feel, well, alive. The combination of sensations had overwhelmed his human form at first, but he had come to enjoy that complexity. Once he'd swallowed it Chell had leaned closer, offering him another piece that he accepted gratefully. As he did, his mouth brushed against something that wasn't Chell's fingertips. Something soft, without the solidity of bone underneath, that twitched slightly as his lips made contact. Suspicious. He pulled up the blindfold with his thumb and flinched. When had Chell's face gotten that close to his own? He had unwittingly delivered her a chaste kiss as he took the pineapple from between her lips. The woman drew back. She didn't look anything like as embarrassed by the contact as Wheatley felt. Maybe there was the barest blush in her cheeks. Otherwise she simply smiled at him, a tiny drip of pineapple juice adhering to her bottom lip. He watched as it finally rolled down her lip and began to trace a crooked path down her chin.

The decision to lean in and lick the juice from her chin had not been a conscious one. It maybe hadn't been a very good one either. But Chell giggled at the innocent way in which he licked her skin. He gave her an awkward, lopsided grin in return as he pulled her into a hug, nuzzling against her neck. She smelt of soap and a hint of sweat. Growing bolder, he drew his tongue along her neck, from the nub of her collarbone to just below her voice box. The taste of her skin along with the pineapple juice that still lingered on his tongue made for an interesting combination. He'd never be entirely used to these human sensations, he decided. He would never have a day in which he didn't find something new to wonder at. Chell had pulled back a little, watching him curiously. Wheatley had no idea what instinct guided his next action, that of practically lunging at her and licking her cheek. Her laughter was loud and tinged with amused shock as she half-heartedly tried to push his face away. What could have been a romantic moment had been reduced to him lapping at her face like an over-excited dog. It was cute and more than a little ridiculous, but somehow it was still just tender. As Wheatley tired himself out and flopped against her shoulder, she curled her arms around him and kissed his brow. Sure, even if Wheatley wasn't really romantic in the typical sense, it didn't matter. Just being silly and excitable and overenthusiastic and _him _was enough.


End file.
